BI-CENTENARY OF CAPTAIN COOK

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 53, 26 November 1928, Page 10

BI-CENTENARY OF CAPTAIN COOK

SOME INTERESTING RELICS • Dominion Special Service. London, October 17. To mark the bi-centenary of the birth of Captain Cook on October 28, an exhibition of Admiralty documents relating to various phases of Cook’s career as navigator and explorer has been arranged in the museum of the Public Record Oflice. Many people believe that there were few such records in existence, but in fact there are 134 of Cook’s logs at the Public Record Oflice alone, and others of his journals which have been rescued from the wilderness of Admiralty archives are to be found at the British Museum and elsewhere. One or two of the logs now on view had fallen into disrepair, and they have been carefully rebound. They are documents which are well worthy of scrutiny, and Cook’s firm, round handwriting makes his own records of his voyages quite easy to read. There is the muster roll of H.M.S. Eagle, showing that Cook entered the Royal Navy as an able seaman on June 17, 1775, and became master’s mate very soon afterwards. A document which has been overlooked, by Cook’s biographers, and which is to be seen here, is a manuscript volume of secret instructions given to him before he sailed on his first voyage in the Endeavour. That this famous Yorkshireman was a strict disciplinarian is shown by an entry in his log of the Endeavour, in which he recorded that he had “punished Samuel Jones with a dozen lashes for disobedience.” His logs were admirably illustrated, and there is a special chart of part of the north-west coast of America, which was enclosed in Cook’s last letter to the Admiralty, delivered by a Russian who had shown great hospitality to the expedition when they landed in Siberia. A personal relic is a letter which Cook wrote to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty in 1771 asking for three weeks’ leave of absence in which to go down to Yorkshire, to transact some business and ‘‘to see an aged father.”